In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine. 

Genres go in and out of style like anything else, and if there ever has been a genre that illustrated that, it’s the Western. It looks like television and movies before about 1960 were nothing but Westerns sometimes—if you were going to have a parody of a cookie-cutter, red meat, popcorn-muncher movie that just might star Simpsons Hollywood himbo character Troy McClure, it absolutely would’ve been a Western in the post-war years. (Today it would be a superhero flick.)

But just as you need infrastructure to make interstate commerce or league sports exist, just as you need to burn mega-liters of dead dinosaurs to make metal tubes fly through the air, you need an entire studio system oriented around making period shows and movies in order for them to work and to be good. Hollywood doesn’t keep as many horses and dusty sets around as it used to, and it must be more difficult finding period-appropriate shooting locations than it used to be. The Boomers that grew up on oaters are older or gone.  Heaven’s Gate bombed so hard that it arguably brought an end to an entire era of Hollywood and ushered in our current age of safely bankable blockbusters—this was in 1980, a year after John Wayne died and almost a decade after one of his last, crankiest, most reactionary Westerns released. The genre was so played out by then that there was a subgenre called the acid western—one of its most notable entries was from 1970.

The Show

We must start with Campbell, in discussing this show, because for anybody checking this thing out 30 years after the fact, he’s the draw.

Campbell is, simply put, one of the most recognizable B-movie actors in Hollywood history, and perhaps one of the most gifted men for the medium in which he’s become famous. The Evil Dead made him and director Sam Raimi into household names when that movie became one of the most successful independent horror films ever. Campbell has never truly been an A-list actor, but he’s always had a cachet in outsider film and TV. He’s got a physique, he’s got a face that’s traditionally handsome (he titled his memoir If Chins Could Kill). But more than either of those things, Bruce Campbell is funny. His performance style is instinctively comedic, his every line delivery game as hell, his understanding of the assignment never less than total. He will do a pratfall for laughs, play the exasperated straight man, proudly get egg on his face. Ryan Gosling is probably the only other actor working today who could just as readily be the leading man in an explicit parody of a genre like the Western.

The trouble with The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is that it isn’t… exactly… a parody. It is not quite earnest enough to be a straight-faced period piece, and not quite slapstick enough to be a send-up. We can start with the runtime: we’re dealing with 45-minute episodes, with the cadence and pacing of a drama and a loosely-ongoing narrative. Yet, the show is definitely also going for laughs.

In the American West of 1893 (it’s a hundred years before the show aired!), tough lawman Brisco County, Sr. (R. Lee Ermey) is killed when the prisoner he’s transporting escapes. The robber barons of the West don’t want the murderous John Bly (Billy Drago) on the loose, and so they decide to hire the man most motivated to capture Bly: County’s own son, bounty hunter and
Harvard-educated lawyer Brisco County, Jr. (Campbell). (His last name is County, it’s not where they’re from or anything. It’s certainly a narrative choice!)

Along with a group of other hangers on that include rival bounty hunter Lord Bowler (Julius Carry) and wacky scientist Professor Wickwire (John Astin!!!), Brisco rides the West on the hunt for Bly, getting embroiled in misadventures along the way.

That sounds like a perfectly serviceable setup for a gunfight-of-the-week show, but it isn’t the whole story by half. The object of interest in this sole season is a strange metallic orb with removable rods stuck in it—when discovered in a cave by Chinese railroad laborers who were hollowing out a mountain for the railroad, one of the removed rods gives the laborers super strength and they decide to just bust out of their chains and beat feet. Army grunts, unimpressed with the object’s description as an “unearthed found object,” label its crate as “U.F.O.” The orb’s powers include super strength, healing, mind control, and, in one episode, calling the spirits of the dead back from the great beyond. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is kind of a Weird West show, a subgenre that may have existed as early as a 1932 Robert E. Howard story, but which has never been quite as popular as other fantasy works.